Literacy is a skill often taken for granted even though mastery of that skill eludes millions of people from all age groups. For those that are literate, an intricate set of skills enable reading and writing to be smooth and automatic processes. This set of skills, referred to as “hidden abilities,” generally appear first at a young age when a person begins to comprehend the speech of others and when that person begins to speak. For example, even a young child may know that the statement “I am looking at she” is incorrect while the statement “I am looking at her” is proper. Generally, any individual does not know the technical reason behind the proper version, but instead, may offer the rationale that “it just sounds right.” (The technical reason is that when a pronoun referring to a feminine individual is used as the object of a preposition, the correct form of the pronoun is “her,” not “she.”) This example illustrates the essence of the hidden abilities that allow a literate person to do amazingly intricate constructions with language without knowing why. These same abilities are constantly operating in written language as well. For example, in a sentence such as The soldier decided to desert in the desert. a skilled reader automatically uses different pronunciations for the two instances of the identically spelled word. For people who are not literate, and especially for young children, these hidden abilities must be developed via literacy education. However, modern systems for teaching literacy fail to address the full range of necessary skills to promote the development of hidden abilities.
In general, two major systems dominate the literacy education field: phonics and whole language. Phonics emphasizes the skill of converting the letters on a page into sounds that become real words (i.e. teaching children to read a word by “sounding out” each letter so that c-a-t becomes “cat”). The processing of sounds falls under a language category known as phonology. The phonics system seems logical because phonology is a significant element in reading, but in practice, phonics teaching is hindered by the complexities of the English language. Phonics relies on teaching that each letter makes a single, distinctive sound. The reality, however, is that this concept holds true for only a tiny fraction of English words. Indeed, of the seventeen words in the preceding sentence, not a single one meets this criterion. The problem is illustrated by the fact that, under the phonics system of teaching, the word “phonics” itself should be spelled “foniks.” In order to overcome this problem, the system relies on children memorizing hundreds of rules, such as the “silent e” rule, the double vowel rule, and the consonant combination rules. However, the memorization of these rules and “sounding out” individual letters may cause reading and writing to be a laborious process and may discourage individual students. The whole language system of teaching literacy focuses on complete stories or groups of words to form meaningful messages, which is different from the phonics system that concentrates on the dissection of individual words. However, children in early stages of reading may encounter a wider range of words that they can mange. As such, the situation may appear overwhelming to the student.
The prevailing assumption is that these two systems, in combination, address all of the skills necessary to literacy. Unfortunately, these two systems, alone or in combination, cover only a portion of the skills that reading requires. The skills that are not addressed by these systems may leave gaps in the literacy education that many students are able to overcome. For those students who are not able to overcome the gaps of the current literacy systems, reading and writing may become a frustrating activity that is to be avoided.
Among the components needed for an effective literacy system are ones that develop the pre-reading skills of visual sequencing and fine motor abilities. In addition, other components needed for an effective literacy system are ones that collectively teach all four of the language skills of phonology, semantics, syntax, and text.